HOW A CHATBOT HELPED ME TALK TO MY DEAD MOTHER
For a grieving son, an AI conversation bot made possible a few meaningful moments of reconciliation, but the technology’s limits were clear.

The desire to communicate with the deceased is one of the oldest human impulses, from Jesus raising Lazarus to the 19th-century quasi-religion of Spiritualism, which attracted everyone from Marie and Pierre Curie to the psychologist William James. Today, Americans spend about $2 billion a year on “psychic services,” including communicating with the dead. 

When my mother died in 2014, more than nearly anything I wanted to see her again. My grief, I was beginning to realize, continued not only because she was no longer here but because I felt like I hadn’t sufficiently known her when she was, that there were aspects of her I never understood (and aspects of myself I hadn’t shared with her, either). This was partly due to the nature of our relationship, but also because I thought I’d have more time.

While seeing Mom again wasn’t possible, I could listen to the interviews I’d done with her in the last days of her life, saved on my laptop but never played back. But the recordings were also, once I learned about Project December, part of what I needed to bring her back to life. 

Independent game designer Jason Rohrer created Project December in 2020, using the large language model GPT-3. Rohrer had little money to develop his early games...READ MORE